Has Obama Been Sufficiently Vetted to Survive the GOP Machine?

by Damozel | Larry C. Johnson of No Quarter has been arguing for quite some time that Obama is insufficiently vetted to withstand attacks from the right. In a recent piece in The Huffington Post, he discusses the basis of his concerns. And while I don’t agree by any means with all Johnson’s conclusions about Obama’s candidacy or Obama himself, the warnings he has sounded and the red flags he has indicated have most certainly given me pause. In fact, it would be fair to say that Johnson’s writings were some of the first to raise serious doubt in my mind about whether Obama is the best candidate for the times (though I continue to hope he will prove to be the presidential candidate of the future).

He writes:

If you think for a minute that the Republican party — who used Willie Horton on Michael Dukakis to devastating effect, who portrayed triple amputee and veteran Max Cleland as a bosom buddy of Osama Bin Laden, and convinced many voters that decorated combat veteran John Kerry was a fraud — will give Obama a pass come the fall then you are in serious denial.

But, unlike the attacks on Dukakis, Cleland, and Kerry, the ammunition that Obama has provided to his political foes is significant and deadly. [Huffpost; links in original]

In light of what we know about GOP tactics, Johnson (like me) is bemused by Obamacrats’ willingness to take him at face value and resistance to questioning (or even allowing anyone else to question) his past and past connections.

“Obama is treated with a reverence and fawning that I have never seen in my life for a political figure,” says Johnson. 

Well, yes, and I sort of get why this is, as I am not immune myself to the wish for a clean slate and a candidate who will represent the US to the world as we really are, as we believe ourselves to be.

W has given us a lot to endure. He’s tarnished our idea of ourselves and of what it means to be American. Is it surprising that we’d want our next president to be the Anti-W—someone with no connection to the disreputable past? Why should we settle for a fallible human being whose only promise is to work hard to sort out the current mess? We want, dammit, an iconic president. And Obama seems perfect in this respect. Perhaps every country needs its Princess Diana in these hard, bitter, dangerous times. If only our government were set up to divide the responsibilities of representing us and presiding over the government, the unresolvable issue of the sufficiency Obama’s political cred and past experience would never need to be canvassed. We could install the more experienced candidate to do the dirty work and heavy lifting involved in cleaning up after Bush and could give our love to Obama, the representative and public face of us. Unlike Hillary, he’s the Anti-Bush. Isn’t he?

Maybe; maybe not. Johnson argues that Obama has some significant drawbacks that are likely to be used by the GOP to tarnish or destroy his image.

Obama’s untested Achilles heel is his relationship with three men — Tony Rezko, William Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi. These names will become shorthand for Corruption, Terrorism, and the Destruction of Israel… Unfortunately, the worshipful, servile attitude of many Democrats and media personalities so far has hindered a tough look at Obama’s friends and associates and his judgment. But that will come. What should concern Democrats keen on taking back the White House is whether or not these issues will be fully vetted before Obama is installed as the candidate. My guess is no…. (HuffPost)

To understand Johnson’s specific concerns, please refer to the linked post. If you do read it, please bear in mind his central point: Whether or not these allegations are true or untrue, and whatever (if anything) they show about Obama, the GOP has done much more damage with much less ammunition. In one way, it doesn’t really matter whether they are true or whether there is credible evidence to support them.

And what do Republicans think? I only have anecdotal evidence. I asked an old friend, who served in law enforcement (I’ll leave the particular agency out of it) for more than thirty years, about the William Ayers era. There are a lot of Federal agents who believe that Ayers is a terrorist who got away with his crimes and still owes a debt to society. My friend wrote the following to me today:

I think many of my friends believe Obama is beatable; however they concede that Clinton can win. Therefore, the thinking goes, WE hope Obama gets the Democratic nod and THEN flood the gates with information later.

(HuffPost)

If these allegations are out there at all—whether true or untrue—shouldn’t Obama’s supporters and the media at least be trying to find out more about them? Hillary can’t bring them up; her campaign can’t even point out facts that can be documented and established by evidence without being accused of this, that, and the other scurrilous attempt to tarnish Obama’s reputation.

In my case, it was the very superficial knowledge of Obama that I have been able to obtain from what’s out there currently that made me jump back off the Obama bandwagon just as I was preparing to climb aboard. As I have said many times, I am not immune to his appeal; when he speaks, I feel just like Chris Matthews. But I don’t feel comfortable supporting a candidate I don’t feel I know for the office of Chief Executive of the United States and the awful (in every sense) job of presiding over the nation in these difficult times. So every time I start to lift the cup of delicious Kool-Aid to my lips, I find myself setting it down again.

Hillary at least has been thoroughly vetted. The so-called ’scandals’ attributed to her have been completely documented. No amount of digging by her political enemies has succeeded in implicating her in Whitewater and the Lewinsky scandal was all Bill’s doing and doubtless hurt her feelings more than ours. Since then, she’s been in the public eye pretty much all the time.

The Pollyanna-ish part of me wonders whether Americans, including those who were duped the first time, will have learned to discount attempted ’swiftboatings.’ But then I take a look at what’s being done to Hillary and Bill Clinton in the media and by members of their and my very own party and I begin to despair again.

Johnson, no Pollyanna, predicts:

Feelings of hope and inspiration about Obama will evaporate when the commercials tying him to a convicted felon slumlord, an unrepentant terrorist who hates the troops, and a Professor of Middle Eastern Studies who has been a PLO official spouting anti-Israeli rhetoric. Oh, YES THEY WILL! YES, THEY WILL. (HuffPost)

The comments to the post reveal that a number of Democrats share his concerns. But you can read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

I don’t think I made it sufficiently clear in my past posts how much I hope that Obama is just as good as he seems—if I’m not enthusiastic about him as a current candidate for the presidency, I certainly hope to see him become a future one. In the meantime, intimations of fallibility do recur. In response, his supporters—instead of acknowledging them—rush to defend him and to reframe/neutralize any potentially unflattering facts. Isn’t Johnson—whether or not you agree with his personal opinion of Obama as a candidate—right about the need not to let partisanship make us as credulous as Bush’s erstwhile supporters?

Aren’t we Democrats supposed, at the very least, to be more cynical than that?

Comments

[Adam]

Ayers is pure guilt-by-association:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_weatherman_connection.html

Ditto for Khalidi; that's plain from LCJ's posts:
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/02/18/more-on-rashid-khalidi-and-the-risks-for-obama/

That post is 98% Khalidi-bashing and 2% guilt-by-association. The extent of these things is that Obama has met these people, and they have given him money. That's all we have, and likely all we will ever have.

As for Rezko - to quote bad pop lyrics, we've been down that road more than twice.

As I have said before, nobody should assume that Obama won't face negative ads. He will. But the statement "...unlike the attacks on Dukakis, Cleland, and Kerry, the ammunition that Obama has provided to his political foes is significant and deadly" is simply unsupportable at this time. He will be attacked because everyone can be attacked. Not because (as far as everything we've seen has shown) the attacks have any real substance.

Obama _is_ being vetted, right before our eyes. And he's holding up to it quite well. Given that one of his signature issues is ethics reform, it's not an enormous surprise. As politicians go, he's pretty clean. Not magically clean, but pretty clean. Again, none of these accusations have come up with anything resembling a smoking gun. These latest accusations barely rise to the level of smoking matchsticks.

This idea that Obama is being treated with kid gloves and nobody is printing negative stuff about him is SO three weeks ago. Once he became the presumptive frontrunner, it became cool to attack him. Why, just in the last two days, Obama has been accused of "sneaking" to a "secret" meeting and plagirizing a speech. This despite his campaign never denying the meeting, and Obama himself admitting that he consulted with the original author before he made the speech. (The Clinton campaign parroted the speech accusation - not their proudest moment.) And of course, this all runs on the canvas of Obama-the-dreamer-who-has-no-practical-ideas-and-has-never-done-anything-of-note.

Again, if your goal in posting this stuff is to dispel the myth of an attack-proof Obama, then I'm with you. If your goal is to show that Obama is especially vulnerable to attack, or even appears to be especially vulnerable, then I respectfully disagree.

[D. Cupples]

Hi Adam,

I didn't write this post but figured it'd be ok if I comment. How are you?

I agree that Obama is NOW being vetted, but it started only over the last few weeks. It will take some time, so I don't view it as "so three weeks ago."

I posted about the "secret" meeting: I don't think the media "accused" him of it, because reports mentioned that Hillary also had a secret meeting w/Edwards (one that news helicopters didn't catch). http://bucknakedpolitics.typepad.com/buck_naked_politics/2008/02/obamas-secret-m.html

RE: "plagiarism," I don't think he committed that. He merely heavily borrowed phrasing and structure from a friend who gave him permission.

Unfortunately, by not giving attribution, he did leave himself open to legitimate questions, but I doubt it'll have a huge effect on his campaign. I blame that mess largely on the media, though it would have been easy for Obama to preclude the questions entirely merely by saying, "As a friend of mine once pointed out....". I posted on that, too: http://bucknakedpolitics.typepad.com/buck_naked_politics/2008/02/obama-a-plagiar.html

I further agree that the Ayres and Khalidi business is guilt by association. The Rove machine will do nasty things with those associations, but what can we do about it?

As for Rezko, I've seen NO evidence that Obama broke laws, but that's not the only question in a presidential campaign. We have a candidate that the media (and to some extent the campaign) has exalted for some weeks as THE idealist, THE Change Candidate, and as anti-politics-as-usual .

If Obama was playing "politics as usual" with respect to his Rezko relationship (even if all actions were legal), that calls into question Obama's credibility as THE anti-politics-as-usual candidate -- especially given that Obama has repeatedly stated that his opponent is into politics-as-usual to a filthy degree.

Glass houses and stones....

[Adam]

Hi, doing well here.

On Rovian attacks - nothing can really be done about it, except to attempt to defuse the stuff in advance by putting everything out in the open. But regardless of that, Obama, or Clinton, will be attacked about things like Ayres and Khalidi. It is what it is.

You're right that Obama was not under this sort of intense focus three weeks ago. This is a function of his new "frontrunner" status, combined with the boredom of the media and the search for stories. I think that as of three weeks ago, he had probably received more vetting than we had seen evidence of. Because he wasn't the frontrunner and there was a lack of juicy scandals, little was made of it.

The media did accuse him of "sneaking", whatever that means. Here's the sidebar I read in the local paper:
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_8291026
That's probably a wire report that got printed in dozens of papers. Maybe they accused Hillary of "sneaking" too. My guess is that this is a vindictive story written by beat reporters who resent the candidate doing something unannounced and not bringing them along. It's just a lame story. No real bias here, just media lowering themselves to tabloid level.

The plagiarism thing is simply a non-issue, as multiple independent analyses have pointed out. The "war room" blog on Salon's front page does a good job addressing it. I mean, it's not like we thought that Obama writes all of his own material, and the guy gave him the thumbs up to use it. It's a little bit embarrasing that the Clinton campaign tried to run with this, IMHO.

I fully agree that Obama's attempt to corner the market on change is just a political trick/tactic, and he deserves whatever criticism that draws. On the other hand, I think his ethics reform record stands on its own, and the minor ethics questions which have been raised about him don't really detract from that.

P.S. Here's some Obama-bashing that I actually sort of like. It's not anything but a hack job, but at least it's genuinely funny:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/opinion/19brooks.html

[D. Cupples]

Adam,

the only two reports that I saw on the "secret" meetings were on ABC (national) and an ABC affiliate in NC. I hadn't seen the Denver Post's.

I respectfully disagree about the speech-borrowing thing but only because of the context (as I posted about yesterday).

[Reader]

You really cannot assume that Clinton has been 'vetted' either. There are her husband's own pardons of convicted terrorists prior to her run for the Senate, as well as a possible issue involving her husband's deals with Kazakhstan recently. And as a resident of rural Florida, folks here have in no way forgotten the scandals of the 1990's; there remains an antipathy toward the Clintons that could cost her (don't forget Florida has a marriage amendment on the ballot; this will bring out Conservatives in droves, no matter who the candidate is). I am not laying these at her feet, but if she takes credit for her husband's administration as part of her 'experience,' she has to take the bad with the good.